[PD] Mess and redundancy in the Pd eco system

[Fred Jan Kraan]

On 2015-06-06 02:07 AM, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> I'd actually like to know better the issues behind extended, and why is
> it so hard to just update it to the newer vanilla version and let people
> manage/update the libraries/externals...
> 
> Why, for instance, can't I update a library like cyclone and release a
> new updated version of extended (let it be 0.43) with the updated
> objects? What's the deal?

If you want Pd-extended 0.43 with the latest cyclone, the simplest way
_now_ would be to replace the cyclone directory in your Pd-extended
installation with the content of the appropriate zip on my site.

The build farm that used to create Pd-extended for all platforms is no
more. Only one server is buiding a distribution
(debian-wheezy-amd64.deb), but it is based on old sources, not the
latest from the svn/git repositories. The 'update link' between the
repositories and build server is also gone.

Roman accurately described the problems with maintaining Pd-extended as
is. Apparently nobody has the time _and_ knowledge _and_ resources to do
it. The 'vanilla' route seems more viable as it distributes the effort
over more people.

Greetings,

Fred Jan
> 
> cheers
> 
> 
> 
> 2015-06-05 20:24 GMT-03:00 Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com
> <mailto:porres at gmail.com>>:
> 
>     I'm actually ok with lots of mess, check my apartment.
> 
>     What actually bums me out is that the maintenance is dead, and
>     there's no sign anything is gonna happen. Last time someone
>     discussed it was 6 months ago and it just went silent...
> 
>     I'd really like to spend a lot of personal effort in this, Pd is a
>     very important part of my work and I'd love to pay it back, but
>     unfortunately I'm no programmer. I'll do what I can, I'll manage,
>     I'll test it, I'll try to clean the mess, I'll report bugs and
>     organize/manage the project. I'll even study and start programming
>     what I can. Count me in, but without an actual community, there's no
>     deal.
> 
>     I just collaborated with supercollider, I helped in a bug report, I
>     revised and rewrote the help of 3 objects, and it went nice and
>     smoothly like a charm. They seem to have a nice community working on
>     out there, we don't. It seems extended was all concentrated in Hans
>     and not a community. 
> 
>     cheers
> 
> 
>     2015-06-05 18:52 GMT-03:00 Roman Haefeli <reduzent at gmail.com
>     <mailto:reduzent at gmail.com>>:
> 
>         On Fre, 2015-06-05 at 14:32 -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
>         > > I couldn't find a [range] object in Pd-extended.
>         >
>         >
>         > I have it in 0.42, maybe yours is 0.43 - it's located in
>         flatspace,
>         > but it doesn't even have a help file...
> 
>         Wow, you're missing so much new stuff... (and yes, I was checking
>         0.43-extended)
> 
>         > Well, this all makes me say how I find Pd-extended to be very
>         messy,
>         > with many redundanct objects, not to mention buggy or poorly
>         > documented (many have no help whatsoever). As I dig further, I
>         just
>         > find more of all this... I know this directs this thread to
>         another
>         > discussion, but I'd really hope for the update and maintenance
>         active
>         > again, and that I could help cleaning some stuff up.
> 
>         I _believe_ Pd-extended was meant to be collection of as much
>         software
>         as was/is available for Pd. It respected the libraries (I'm sure
>         this is
>         argued by some, regarding multi-object libs vs. single-object
>         externals)
>         and put it into namespaces so that the user can decide what to
>         use and
>         what not. One could also say it deferred the burden to deal with the
>         mess on the user. But it made much of the existing Pd ecosystem
>         available to the masses - which I consider a huge achievement -
>         and you
>         can more or less assume that a patch made on platform Y will
>         work the
>         same on platform X with the same version of Pd-extended.
> 
>         I think tiding it all up is again a huge task. It's all free
>         software,
>         so anyone could do it. Having followed this list for a few years, I
>         don't believe in the "authoritative" collection of Pd externals and
>         abstraction anymore. People are using software in different ways for
>         different purposes, and one can observe that many create their
>         own nice
>         tidied-up unified collections of abstractions (mtl, rjlib,
>         netpd, etc.)
>         and none of them gained so much traction that they would be used
>         by a
>         majority of the Pd users. I even think that trying it would be a
>         lost
>         game and would end up with endless mailing list debates.
> 
>         Retrospectively, it looks like maintaining something like
>         Pd-extended is
>         a too complex task to be distributed among many and too much for a
>         single person (Pd-L2ork being the counter example). I sense
>         agreement on
>         the notion that effort is better spent on making separate libraries
>         easily accessible/distributable. People willing to help could
>         focus on
>         the external they have the most interest in. It already started in
>         Debian, where IOhannes, Hans (mainly) and me (to some lesser degree)
>         worked on creating proper Debian packages of a lot of externals.
>         Similar
>         could be done for other platforms, too. Pd-extended could be the
>         collection of those packages that are available on all major
>         platforms
>         (or whatever).
> 
>         Personally, I suffer most from the fact, that Pd-extended is a
>         separately maintained Pd with patches on one hand and a
>         collection of
>         externals on the other. If it would be simply a Pd with a
>         collection of
>         externals, it would be much simpler to just update Pd and add -
>         for all
>         I care - a frozen collection of externals. Pd-extended was
>         always  one
>         or two versions behind Pd. Now it's already three. If I want to
>         make my
>         stuff portable and available to non-Pd-savvy people, I have to stick
>         with compatibility with Pd-extended 0.43, which is a huge pain,
>         considering what more recent versions of Pd offer ([array], [text],
>         [oscparse], new methods for time based objects, etc.).
> 
>         I agree with you that there is a lot of mess and redundancy. But
>         I'm not
>         sure if it matters that much.
> 
>         Roman
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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